“On-set” or “on-site” video and film production often requires precise camera lens focus/aperture adjustment to set the focused area of the image frame and the depth-of-field (DOF) to determine how much of the image content should be focused. Often there are artistic reasons to minimize the DOF to target the viewer's attention to a particular section of the image which may not be in the center of the image. Sometimes it is possible to zoom-in on the area of attention and set the focus but this is not always possible without re-framing or when tracking focus on subjects moving to or from the camera. Also, not all lenses hold focus over the entire zoom range.
Presently, both film and video production use high quality cameras with high resolution imagers of 4K pixels or more. Therefore, it has become more difficult to set focus precisely without using a large reference monitor. Unfortunately, small viewfinder-size monitors are typically all that is available on the camera or on set. These viewfinder-monitors often have a means of indicating the focused region of the image by adding a false colored marker over the displayed camera image. These are often called “focus peaking” or just “peaking” overlays. Oftentimes, even illustrating the focus peaking overlays do not provide the user with as much focus information as desired.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other limitations of the prior art.